Cultural Evolution and Its Discontents
Even though we celebrate our cultural artifacts as evidence of heights of human evolution, we should also take cognisance of the fact that very same cultural evolution responsible for our advanced civilizations is also the abattoir where civilizations meet their demise. Today, probably more than ever, humanity stands at the crossroads where the direction of our current cultural evolution if unperturbed could lead to the existinction not only of the human race but of most species on the planet.
It is of interest to see how the word culture is connected to the word cultivate and the word cult. Cultivation or tillage has connections to the advent of what might be considered as high or advanced culture with the advent of the agriculture in human history about 10,000 years ago. From this period on we see humans creating permanent settlements, organized into villages, then later towns, cities and states. These organized communities were fertile grounds for the development of cultural aspects like rituals, religions, values, beliefs, art, governments, laws, writing, education and eventually advanced science and technology.
As for the less positive word ‘cult’, it is usually associated with devotion, often blind following. A link between the word cult and culture would imply a less favorable aspect of culture and cultural evolution. Characteristic of all cultures are aspects like blind belief without the need for rational explanation or evidence, as well as cultural biases in favor of one’s culture and against other cultures and those who belong to those cultures. I often see how people in America casually make negative jocks about people of other cultures like the Mexicans, the Chinese and the French. At more serious level, cultural biases with their cult followings of people within those cultures is sometimes used for war, violence and discrimination. I doubt if it was very difficult for a few instigators to exploit political tensions and cultural biases in order to instigate the mass murders between Hutus and Tutsis resulting in about 1 million deaths, and nothing to be gained. The current religious and cultural cold war between the Western world and the Moslem world is basically a conflict between the Western Judeo-Christian cults versus the Moslem cult. The blind followers in each cult will easily swallow any propaganda against the other cult without need for critical thought or meaningful evidence.
Today we also see how cultural aspects of world cultures in particular the Western world, and more recently the East have become a stumbling block in the ‘Great Transition’ towards creating sustainable societies. The modern world has given birth to a new breed of cross-cultural and cross-geographical culture called consumerism. The problems of global climatic change and environmental degradation are for most part products of Western, post-industrial, capitalist culture. The Western world and to some degree its loyal disciples, the rest of the world, are deeply embedded in unsustainable lifestyles. This is evident in suburban sprawl with its attendant commercial distribution channels like shopping malls, fast food outlets and other markets for the mass consumers.
In the global cultural arena of consumerism the main players are the corporations, mass media and the consumers. The corporate cultural role is mass production of goods and profit maximization. The media cultural role is the dissemination of mass propaganda, disinformation, perception management and the promotion of trends and habits conducive for the expansion of consumer culture. The consumer cultural role is to consume as much as possible. These consumers having been cultured or brainwashed by the media to believe that their worth depends on how many toys they have or how much they consume, they helplessly follow the impulse to buy what they do not need despite the financial and ecological costs of such habits. The average rate at which people consume resources like oil and metals, and produce wastes like plastics and greenhouse gases, are about 32 times higher in North America, Western Europe, Japan and Australia than they are in the developing world. In its September 2008 issue, the journal Energy Policy found that around 1/3rd of Chinese carbon dioxide emissions were due to the production of exports and that it is mostly the developed world consuming these. As Jared Diamond puts it in the article ‘What’s Your Consumption Factor’, “...a real problem for the world is that each of us 300 million Americans consumes as much as 32 Kenyans.”
It will take another cultural evolution to evolve out of our consumption culture. A change in culture is inline with the current environmental theory and American Pragmatism, as stated by Eric Retan that, “…the contemporary consumerist worldview is largely to blame for our current environmental crisis, and any solution to that crisis must be driven by a change in worldview” (Reitan, 1998, p.2)
However, as Richard Robbins states, such a cultural revolution may be a difficult change to achieve, “…it may be the most difficult to change; our consumption patterns are so much a part of our lives that to change them would require a massive cultural overhaul, not to mention severe economic dislocation.”
The survival imperative of our species needs humanity today to emberace a new zeitgeist or spirit of the times, to evolve us out of the cultural evolution that has led us to the culture of mindless consumption. Only through a new cultural evolution to sustainability can we escape the impending ecological apocalypse.
Richard Robbins, Global Problem and the Culture of Capitalism, (Allyn and Bacon, 1999), pp. 209-210
World Future Scenarios
If we are lucky the recent protests and growing dissatisfaction with Wall Street, the banking system and current economic systems disproportionately benefiting a few on top at the expense of the whole planet, could give birth to a new future. The next decade beginning now will most likely be marked by significant decisions and bold actions to shape the future of the world. Failure to choose a meaningful path in the next decade could mean inescapable doom for humanity.
It is clear that the next few decades and century will not be just a continuity of the predominant social-economic system we have today, characterised by high consumption and business as usual. Five possible scenarios are visible when observing current trends and possible turns, namely collapse, technological solutions, return to paradise, sustainability and a combination scenario.
i. Collapse: the first possible scenario is a collapse of society as we know it. A few days i was reading about how a US Presidential candidate's group edited an environment report removing mention of climatic change. Such attitudes examplifies a broad base of political and business leaders unwilling to recognise climatic change and insisting on business as usual. Unless the public forces change on such political and business leadership, environmental destruction will continue to increase at an accelerated rate. Eventually the results of ecological damage and climatic change will be resource shortages, mass starvation, excessive price increases, high costs of living, riots, political conflicts, wars over resources, collapse of world economic systems, and emergence of fortress worlds.
ii. Technological solutions: this second scenario plays out if human technology can achieve exponential growth or leaps in the coming few years. Considering the past leaps
or jumps of technology in the past decades, it is a viable possiblity for new technological miracles to change the direction of the world. Geo-engineering is one sphere where progress could result in solution reversing climatic change and repairing the damaged ecosystem. Progress in other areas like nanotechnology could also reverse heavy reliance on natural resources for the production of goods. We could see technologies allowing us to effectively recycle all used materials after producing them with renewable energies at zero pollution or impact to the environment.
Technological breakthroughs in health and genetic engineering could also change the direction of human civilization. The improved quality of life in the modern era has increased human life expectancy but has also resulted in increased numbers of old citizens considered to be dependants. Advances in genetic engineering could trnasform high life expectancy to delayed aging and more years of youthfulness. In other words, aging may be delayed from 50 years of age to 80, making an 80 year old person as youthful as a 40 or 50 year old. The production of G.M.O foods may also be transfromed into something less suspicious but very useful like (GMO) Genetically Modified Organics. These crops would yield high quantity nutritious produce without destroying the soil or polluting the environment or yield. Technological development could also solve our reliance on fossil fuels through the introduction of zero emission or renewable energy vehicles, or even totally get rid of such vehicles by introducing displacement machines capable of instantly teleporting humans or goods from one location to another with zero pollution or resource consumption.
iii. Return to paradise: this future scenario involves a return to pre-industrial paradise. Faced with current economic failures and growing environmental problems, humanity or large portions of it might just withdraw from modern life and retreat to the countryside, villages or jungles to basically relive the ancient past. The intension of such a move will be to allow the ecosystem to recover from the industrial assault. However, this solution would not work for a large population of 7 billion people. The planet does not have enough farming land for 7 billion people, and even if it did such mass farming would further demage the ecosystem. As for hunting and gathering, there is barely anything in the forests today to gather and live by, and not enough animals to hunt. Therefore a return to pre-industrial paradise would result in failure, tribal wars, wars for food and land, and mass starvation.
iv. Sustainability: the fourth future scenario of sustainability is a very possible scenario. There is currently a growing interest in sustainable living and preserving the environment. The major environmental problems we face today is because our current world paradigm is consumer capitalism based on the notion of limitless expansion on a finite planet. Our modern cultures have been evolving in that environment and within habits of taking from the environment without giving back. However, our population and consumption habits have
grown way beyond our planet's capacity to sustain.
As Graeme Taylor puts it in 'At the Cutting Edge of Evolution', "..Humanity has no choice: if global civilization is to survive, it must evolve into a completely new type of sociatal system. A consumer society cannot be transformed into a conserver society without structural change."
Sustainable planning, lifestyles, economics, production and technologies will be the only way humans can survive on a planet in peril. For this to work, large populations of humanity will have to force the political and business leadership to adopt sustainability as a new paradigm of operation.
v. Combination scenario: the last and most likely scenario to play out may be a combination of parts of several scenarios. Firstly, an increase in ecological problems and more collapses in economic systems will force the majority of the world to understand the reality of the ecological crisis humanity is facing. With such clarity the will put pressure of their political and business leaders to implement reforms and new policies towards sustainability for survival. Governments will then put policies and rules as well as systems in favour of sustainability. The news systems will be aided by new technologies promoting sustainable lifestyle and clean energies. The end result will be a paradigm shift towards sustainability and restoration of the ecosystem.
'At the Cutting Edge of Evolution' - Graeme Taylor
8802 Critical Reflections
Cultural Evolution and Its Discontents
Even though we celebrate our cultural artifacts as evidence of heights of human evolution, we should also take cognisance of the fact that very same cultural evolution responsible for our advanced civilizations is also the abattoir where civilizations meet their demise. Today, probably more than ever, humanity stands at the crossroads where the direction of our current cultural evolution if unperturbed could lead to the existinction not only of the human race but of most species on the planet.
It is of interest to see how the word culture is connected to the word cultivate and the word cult. Cultivation or tillage has connections to the advent of what might be considered as high or advanced culture with the advent of the agriculture in human history about 10,000 years ago. From this period on we see humans creating permanent settlements, organized into villages, then later towns, cities and states. These organized communities were fertile grounds for the development of cultural aspects like rituals, religions, values, beliefs, art, governments, laws, writing, education and eventually advanced science and technology.
As for the less positive word ‘cult’, it is usually associated with devotion, often blind following. A link between the word cult and culture would imply a less favorable aspect of culture and cultural evolution. Characteristic of all cultures are aspects like blind belief without the need for rational explanation or evidence, as well as cultural biases in favor of one’s culture and against other cultures and those who belong to those cultures. I often see how people in America casually make negative jocks about people of other cultures like the Mexicans, the Chinese and the French. At more serious level, cultural biases with their cult followings of people within those cultures is sometimes used for war, violence and discrimination. I doubt if it was very difficult for a few instigators to exploit political tensions and cultural biases in order to instigate the mass murders between Hutus and Tutsis resulting in about 1 million deaths, and nothing to be gained. The current religious and cultural cold war between the Western world and the Moslem world is basically a conflict between the Western Judeo-Christian cults versus the Moslem cult. The blind followers in each cult will easily swallow any propaganda against the other cult without need for critical thought or meaningful evidence.
Today we also see how cultural aspects of world cultures in particular the Western world, and more recently the East have become a stumbling block in the ‘Great Transition’ towards creating sustainable societies. The modern world has given birth to a new breed of cross-cultural and cross-geographical culture called consumerism. The problems of global climatic change and environmental degradation are for most part products of Western, post-industrial, capitalist culture. The Western world and to some degree its loyal disciples, the rest of the world, are deeply embedded in unsustainable lifestyles. This is evident in suburban sprawl with its attendant commercial distribution channels like shopping malls, fast food outlets and other markets for the mass consumers.
In the global cultural arena of consumerism the main players are the corporations, mass media and the consumers. The corporate cultural role is mass production of goods and profit maximization. The media cultural role is the dissemination of mass propaganda, disinformation, perception management and the promotion of trends and habits conducive for the expansion of consumer culture. The consumer cultural role is to consume as much as possible. These consumers having been cultured or brainwashed by the media to believe that their worth depends on how many toys they have or how much they consume, they helplessly follow the impulse to buy what they do not need despite the financial and ecological costs of such habits. The average rate at which people consume resources like oil and metals, and produce wastes like plastics and greenhouse gases, are about 32 times higher in North America, Western Europe, Japan and Australia than they are in the developing world. In its September 2008 issue, the journal Energy Policy found that around 1/3rd of Chinese carbon dioxide emissions were due to the production of exports and that it is mostly the developed world consuming these. As Jared Diamond puts it in the article ‘What’s Your Consumption Factor’, “...a real problem for the world is that each of us 300 million Americans consumes as much as 32 Kenyans.”
It will take another cultural evolution to evolve out of our consumption culture. A change in culture is inline with the current environmental theory and American Pragmatism, as stated by Eric Retan that, “…the contemporary consumerist worldview is largely to blame for our current environmental crisis, and any solution to that crisis must be driven by a change in worldview” (Reitan, 1998, p.2)
However, as Richard Robbins states, such a cultural revolution may be a difficult change to achieve, “…it may be the most difficult to change; our consumption patterns are so much a part of our lives that to change them would require a massive cultural overhaul, not to mention severe economic dislocation.”
The survival imperative of our species needs humanity today to emberace a new zeitgeist or spirit of the times, to evolve us out of the cultural evolution that has led us to the culture of mindless consumption. Only through a new cultural evolution to sustainability can we escape the impending ecological apocalypse.
Refs:
What’s Your Consumption Factor? By Jared Diamond
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/02/opinion/02diamond.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
Richard Robbins, Global Problem and the Culture of Capitalism, (Allyn and Bacon, 1999), pp. 209-210
World Future Scenarios
If we are lucky the recent protests and growing dissatisfaction with Wall Street, the banking system and current economic systems disproportionately benefiting a few on top at the expense of the whole planet, could give birth to a new future. The next decade beginning now will most likely be marked by significant decisions and bold actions to shape the future of the world. Failure to choose a meaningful path in the next decade could mean inescapable doom for humanity.
It is clear that the next few decades and century will not be just a continuity of the predominant social-economic system we have today, characterised by high consumption and business as usual. Five possible scenarios are visible when observing current trends and possible turns, namely collapse, technological solutions, return to paradise, sustainability and a combination scenario.
i. Collapse: the first possible scenario is a collapse of society as we know it. A few days i was reading about how a US Presidential candidate's group edited an environment report removing mention of climatic change. Such attitudes examplifies a broad base of political and business leaders unwilling to recognise climatic change and insisting on business as usual. Unless the public forces change on such political and business leadership, environmental destruction will continue to increase at an accelerated rate. Eventually the results of ecological damage and climatic change will be resource shortages, mass starvation, excessive price increases, high costs of living, riots, political conflicts, wars over resources, collapse of world economic systems, and emergence of fortress worlds.
ii. Technological solutions: this second scenario plays out if human technology can achieve exponential growth or leaps in the coming few years. Considering the past leaps
or jumps of technology in the past decades, it is a viable possiblity for new technological miracles to change the direction of the world. Geo-engineering is one sphere where progress could result in solution reversing climatic change and repairing the damaged ecosystem. Progress in other areas like nanotechnology could also reverse heavy reliance on natural resources for the production of goods. We could see technologies allowing us to effectively recycle all used materials after producing them with renewable energies at zero pollution or impact to the environment.
Technological breakthroughs in health and genetic engineering could also change the direction of human civilization. The improved quality of life in the modern era has increased human life expectancy but has also resulted in increased numbers of old citizens considered to be dependants. Advances in genetic engineering could trnasform high life expectancy to delayed aging and more years of youthfulness. In other words, aging may be delayed from 50 years of age to 80, making an 80 year old person as youthful as a 40 or 50 year old. The production of G.M.O foods may also be transfromed into something less suspicious but very useful like (GMO) Genetically Modified Organics. These crops would yield high quantity nutritious produce without destroying the soil or polluting the environment or yield. Technological development could also solve our reliance on fossil fuels through the introduction of zero emission or renewable energy vehicles, or even totally get rid of such vehicles by introducing displacement machines capable of instantly teleporting humans or goods from one location to another with zero pollution or resource consumption.
iii. Return to paradise: this future scenario involves a return to pre-industrial paradise. Faced with current economic failures and growing environmental problems, humanity or large portions of it might just withdraw from modern life and retreat to the countryside, villages or jungles to basically relive the ancient past. The intension of such a move will be to allow the ecosystem to recover from the industrial assault. However, this solution would not work for a large population of 7 billion people. The planet does not have enough farming land for 7 billion people, and even if it did such mass farming would further demage the ecosystem. As for hunting and gathering, there is barely anything in the forests today to gather and live by, and not enough animals to hunt. Therefore a return to pre-industrial paradise would result in failure, tribal wars, wars for food and land, and mass starvation.
iv. Sustainability: the fourth future scenario of sustainability is a very possible scenario. There is currently a growing interest in sustainable living and preserving the environment. The major environmental problems we face today is because our current world paradigm is consumer capitalism based on the notion of limitless expansion on a finite planet. Our modern cultures have been evolving in that environment and within habits of taking from the environment without giving back. However, our population and consumption habits have
grown way beyond our planet's capacity to sustain.
As Graeme Taylor puts it in 'At the Cutting Edge of Evolution', "..Humanity has no choice: if global civilization is to survive, it must evolve into a completely new type of sociatal system. A consumer society cannot be transformed into a conserver society without structural change."
Sustainable planning, lifestyles, economics, production and technologies will be the only way humans can survive on a planet in peril. For this to work, large populations of humanity will have to force the political and business leadership to adopt sustainability as a new paradigm of operation.
v. Combination scenario: the last and most likely scenario to play out may be a combination of parts of several scenarios. Firstly, an increase in ecological problems and more collapses in economic systems will force the majority of the world to understand the reality of the ecological crisis humanity is facing. With such clarity the will put pressure of their political and business leaders to implement reforms and new policies towards sustainability for survival. Governments will then put policies and rules as well as systems in favour of sustainability. The news systems will be aided by new technologies promoting sustainable lifestyle and clean energies. The end result will be a paradigm shift towards sustainability and restoration of the ecosystem.
'At the Cutting Edge of Evolution' - Graeme Taylor
Rick Perry officials spark revolt after doctoring environment report
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/oct/14/rick-perry-texas-censorship-environment-report?newsfeed=true